Doug McCrae, former head naturalist at Presqu’ile Provincial Park, supports reducing deer numbers in the park but he doesn’t believe cormorants are a problem.

“People just hate cormorants,” he asserts, whereas the “biological argument (for harvesting deer) is sound,” McCrae said. “In fact, I was one of the early advocates for the deer cull … (beginning in) the early ’90s even when the park was resistant to the idea.”

The key role of the parks management plan is to protect the biodiversity of the area, he said.

“It is front and centre as a core purpose of these parks — it does not preclude recreation — they have a responsibility to maintain or enhance the biodiversity if damaged. To me the deer cull sits perfectly within that purpose.”

Culling the cormorants is a different story.

“They’ve gone wild on cormorants and to me it is a false alarm,” McCrae said. “I think it is a real tragedy because there are many things going wrong in Presqu’ile Park biologically that need attention and cormorants killing 10 hectares of trees just isn’t on my radar as a big issue.”

The ministry says its goal is to protect woodland habitat important to several species threatened throughout the Great Lakes, such as the monarch butterfly, the black-crowned night heron and the great egret.

McCrae said if the ministry had taken even half the money it has spent on activities such as culling and put it into projects such as reestablishing vegetation, it would be much further ahead.

McCrae, who has written about birds and been a global bird tour guide for more than 20 years, said cormorants began nesting on Gull Island in 1985 and had killed off the trees within a decade. Later they moved to High Bluff Island, and, by 1998, they had killed a number of the big trees there as well — “and magically the first ever great blue heron started nesting there. The next year egrets nested there for the first time ever.”

“They spent about $1 million to date on this cormorant program — this is my figure — and if the whole point of this is to save some trees, well, I just can’t agree with that. With $1 million they could have bought land on the mainland and built a buffer on the park or spent it on the non-native vegetation.”

McCrae said black-crowned night herons have nested on the islands since the 1960s while other bird species have come and gone as part of a natural cycle.

“It all balances out over time. The birds reflect what is going on in the lake ecosystem — that is what drives the change,” he said. “In my opinion cormorants generate biodiversity — they are not the threat.”

Northumberland-Quinte West MPP Lou Rinaldi, who has lived in the area for three decades, said he’s in favour of culling the deer as well as cormorants because of the damage they are doing to the park. He said he believes cormorants are having a negative impact on commercial and recreational fishing in the area.

“And the once-pristine beaches have been impacted by (elevated) fecal counts in the water from the islands so we need a long-term sustainable way to do this and I am in favour of having proper management of the park.”